Tom Cousins, 93, a developer and civic leader grounded in faith and community 

Update: Friends and family are invited to a celebration of life for Thomas Grady Cousins at noon on Thursday, August 28, 2025 at North Avenue Presbyterian Church in downtown Atlanta. The service will be followed by a reception at East Lake Golf Club from 2-4 pm. The service also is being live-streamed through this link.

It was after 10 p.m. in the mid-1990s when Tom Cousins called me to say how conflicted he was by all the attention he was getting for his plans to renovate the East Lake Golf Club and to redevelop the East Lake Meadows public housing project.

He quoted from the New Testament’s Book of Matthew: “When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be done in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” 

(A thank you to George Wirth, one of Cousins’ pastors and close friends, for helping me identify the passage.) 

That was Cousins in a nutshell. He was a humble man who was dedicated to making the world a better place. But he did not want to be recognized for his good deeds.

At the time, I was the lead business columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writing about local leaders who were impacting the community and seeking to remove the veil of anonymity that had shielded them for decades.

My first lengthy interview with Cousins was in May 1991 titled: “One developer going strong as others fail.”

Cousins told me how close he came to going into default in 1973, when Atlanta was hit with its worst real estate depression to date. Up to that point, Cousins had been primarily a residential developer who had created the groundbreaking subdivision Indian Hills in East Cobb.

At the Cousins’ annual meeting in April 1973, Cousins had told his shareholders that for the first time since 1962, he could tell them there were no problems on the horizon. By the time he got back to his office that day, all had begun to unravel. 

“Within 30 days, it was like the world had caved in,” Cousins told me. Over the next two years, the company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, losing nearly all the money it had made in the previous 12 years. 

That’s when I learned of Cousins’ perseverance. 

“We went to work before daylight and quit after it was dark,” Cousins said. “It took a good, hard kick in the pants to teach me, but you don’t have to kick me but once. I get the message. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” I don’t believe there’s any way to go broke if you don’t owe any money.”

Larry Gellerstedt III remembered when he was named CEO of Cousins Properties in 2009. Tom Cousins, who was no longer on the company’s board, asked Gellerstedt to come see him. Cousins had stacked up every annual report since the company’s inception.

“He wanted to go through them,” Gellerstedt said of Cousins, who became a “surrogate dad” to him after his father, Lawrence Gellerstedt Jr., had died in 2003. 

“He showed me the spectacularly good decisions, the spectacularly bad decisions and what he had learned each time. He told me you can learn more from your mistakes than your victories.”

Gellerstedt III said his father and Cousins were especially close friends — civic partners in everything Atlanta and Georgia.

One of my favorite stories was the launching of the Georgia Research Alliance. In the late 1980s, Gellerstedt Jr. was chairing the search for a new president of Georgia Tech, and Cousins was chairing the search for a new president of the University of Georgia. 

At the time, the presidents of Georgia Tech and UGA could not even be in the same room together. That rivalry had prevented Georgia from becoming a research and technology leader.

In their respective searches, Gellerstedt and Cousins agreed to make academic collaboration a criterion in selecting the new university presidents, enabling the formation of the Georgia Research Alliance, one of the most successful public-private partnerships in the state’s history. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I helped write the 20-year history of GRA, and I just listened to the interview I did with Cousins for that project.

Much has been written about how Cousins developed the East Lake model, redeveloping a struggling public housing community and transforming that into a mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhood.

In fairness, Cousins adopted the model from Egbert Perry, who had redeveloped Techwood Homes, the first public housing project in the nation, into Centennial Place. Also a first of its kind. In developing East Lake, Cousins worked closely with Renee Glover of the Atlanta Housing Authority, and Eva Davis, leader of the East Lake Meadows tenant association.

I remember when Cousins addressed the Rotary Club of Atlanta on Nov. 13, 1995, to talk about East Lake. He acknowledged that a friend had asked him if he had lost his “blankety-blank mind” by investing in the risky project.

“If I’m indeed crazy, it’s because I truly believe a restored East Lake golf course can be part of the restoration of the neighborhood.” Cousins told Atlanta Rotarians that day. “I’ve been scattering my giving over the years, and I haven’t seen anything for my giving. I wanted to invest in one area where I could see a difference.”

A favorite memory for me was seeing how Cousins took the East Lake model – and launched Purpose Built Communities, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that sought to replicate the model across the country.

Cousins’ two financial partners in that venture were Warren Buffett and Julian Robertson, two billionaires who believed in Cousins’ vision. The three of them attended the national conference of Purpose Built Communities in 2011 to see how the Indianapolis model was progressing. I was so fortunate to interview the three of them during that conference.

Purpose Built is still going strong – helping guide the revitalization of 27 communities in the United States.

Cousins was a complex man with unusual friendships, including Gellerstedt Jr.

“They were fast friends, but they were really different people,” Gellerstedt III said. “My dad didn’t hunt or play golf. As different as they were as people, they both shunned credit. It’s a bit of a Southern thing.”

The most unusual friendship, however, was the one between Cousins and media mogul Ted Turner. I asked both men repeatedly if I could interview them about their friendship, but they declined.

While they had totally different lifestyles, Turner and Cousins were close friends and business partners, sharing a love of nature and the earth. They both liked to hunt and fish, so it was in keeping with their friendship that Turner bought the Nonami Plantation from Tom Cousins in 2010.

At the bottom of my story on that transaction, I included a passage from Turner’s book “Call Me Ted,” where Cousins had recalled how Turner got him to invest in his fledgling television empire. I so wish I could have been a fly on the wall during one of the many vacations that Turner and Jane Fonda, Tom and Ann Cousins had spent together.

Cousins had a special fondness for the American Indian. At his company headquarters at Wildwood in the 1990s, Cousins had paintings of American Indian chiefs who had signed peace treaties with the white man.

“I still get mad when I tell the story. We made peace treaties with the Indians and promptly broke them,” Cousins told me in 1992. “We came and took their land. This was their country. I respect their respect for the environment. They were very, very sad about the way we treated the environment. We killed off the buffalo. And we as a nation still violate the environment.”

So much has been written about Cousins since his death on July 29 that I initially wondered what more I could write about the man. Here is a link to the obit. His daughter, Lillian Giornelli, said a memorial service for Tom Cousins will be held on Thursday, Aug. 28 at North Avenue Presbyterian Church.

I’ve always wanted to know more about the competitive and sometimes adversarial relationship between Tom Cousins and John Portman. Some have described it as a power struggle between the two men over who would develop Downtown Atlanta. But they both ended up implementing their separate visions during the city’s most formative years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Thomas Wolfe, author of “A Man in Full,” presumably used both men as the inspiration for the character of redneck developer Charlie Croker. I’ve always felt Wolfe shortchanged both men, who were each global thinkers and visionaries.

On Monday morning, Gellerstedt III, who told me how lucky he was to have gotten to know Cousins as a client, boss, business and civic partner over the years.

The last time they talked was the week before Cousins died. When Gellerstedt III asked him how he was doing, Cousins responded: “Better than I deserve, pal.”

“His spirit, his optimism, his faith never wavered,” Gellerstedt III said. “I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have known Tom. There’s a sense of loss, but I pinch myself for just being able to have had Tom as a mentor and a friend. The world needs more Tom Cousins.”

I agree completely.